Emily Giffin Quotes

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

So ultimately I am looking for a story that has some value and is important and is entertaining.

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I'm a huge fan of Richard Curtis - there's real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it's a wonderful cocktail.

The books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

There are so many romantic comedies made, but very few dramas or love stories. And with a love story, you have to take time to develop three-dimensional characters.

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.

'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great in a kind of realistic normal story without throwing objects to the camera, but using the 3D on the emotions in an intimate story.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

The writers who inspire me most are all women: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. As for contemporary novels, one of my favourites is 'Everyone Brave is Forgiven' by Chris Cleave. It's the sort of book to read if you've fallen out of love with reading - it reminds you just how brilliant novels can be.

My mother was a Book of the Month Club devotee. I remember she always looked forward to Pearl Buck's books.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

I love fiction and read novels constantly.